Debutantee Cry For It

A charge often levelled against the Princeton undergraduate by outsiders--namely, that he is cast into a certain inevitable mould by the time he has run the gamut of extra-curricular activities, clubs, week-ends and final comprehensives--must be recognized as having an element of truth. There certainly is a definite "Princeton manner" and attitude toward life which is more especially observable in the Princetonian when he is away from college and alone in an alien society. Debutantes call it "smoothness" and idolize it, but others are inclined to characterize it as everything from "snobbishness" to "pseudo-sophistication." And it has its undesirable features as well as its advantages.

The keynote of this manner and perhaps its most unfortunate aspect is its suppression of enthusiasm in any form. Life, with all its varied experience and shifting sensations, is not so remarkable after all and the idea is to sail through it as much on an even keel as possible. To be surprised or shocked at anything or to have some absorbing interest is, to say the least, bad form. There is a definite philosophy behind this attitude which would doubtless find its supporters among the Epicureans and Cyrenaics of antiquity--namely, that nothing abides but all things flow so why should one thing matter more than another. It is no longer tenable, however, in the present day, where life cannot be experienced as a whole nor taken as it comes by anyone but a tramp or a young man, and where certain forms of experience must be selected and cultivated to the exclusion of others.

There are, of course, advantages to this manner. The extreme self-possession of the average Princeton man gives him the somewhat meretricious air of having a vast knowledge of the world and its ways, a quality that is revered everywhere. He is inclined to cultivate the social graces, to have his daily shave, shine, shower, and shampoo, and to wear the right clothes on the right occasions; hence he is a very desirable member of the society in which he moves. But the fact remains that he is a hard person to know for what he really is, that sooner or later the world will wash off his veneer, and that enthusiasm is the first requisite for achievement. --Daily Princetonian.